Home Grown

My mom grew up on a small family farm outside of Detroit at the end of the depression where she learned the value of local food production, eating what you can grow or find and putting up food during the plentiful summer and fall to help feed the family through the winter and spring. Those principles were part of the foundation of my upbringing, and my mom still practices them today. Childhood memories include Saturday morning trips to the farmers market, and warm summer days spent picking strawberries, raspberries and blueberries at u-pick farms. Although my mom’s goal for the picking trips was to bring home a bounty of fresh fruit, to be eaten, baked with, turned in to jams, and frozen for future consumption, my brother and I may have had a slightly different focus. We were young children let loose in a field of sweet treats. To this day, I wonder how much more mom would have had to pay for berries, had the farmers instituted a policy of collecting before and after weights on the young harvest helpers, and charging for the difference. I remember harvesting wild asparagus by the side of the road at the junction of Island Lake Rd and Dexter-Pinkney Rd, in Dexter, and climbing apple trees in the old abandoned apple orchard in Bird Hills Woods, to collect apples. I would often start eating them while I was still in the tree because they are never better then when they are first picked. And who could forget hot, steamy days in the kitchen, helping my mom can peaches and tomatoes.

Despite my mom’s lessons in using and preserving local foods, for 30 years after leaving my parent’s home, I happily used the supermarket as my source for fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, jams, and canned fruit and tomatoes, with little attention to where and how my food was grown. It certainly was the easiest path to putting food on the table during the busy years of school, work and child rearing. And it is easy to get caught up in the norm of cheap food, produced by megaproducers, shipped from half way around the the world to reach our tables, and everything available 365 days a year, no matter what the weather outside our own doors is doing. It took us finally taking the time to look away from our own busy lives to pay attention to the fact that the animals we were eating were being raised in unhealthy, inhumane settings, the land our food crops were being grown on was being overused and abused, and the energy expended to get that food from where it was grown to us was contributing to global warming. All of this was threatening the world our kids and grandkids need to live in. Not to mention that the people that were raising our food were mostly underpaid laborers, working for huge farming corporations. And the whole spiraling catch 22 that drives big farming, of continually needing to grow more, on the same land, for less money, was pushed along by our expectations that food should be dirt cheap, despite the fact that the presence of so many middle men between the producers and the consumers meant that the actual growers were getting only pennies on the dollar we were spending at the store.

Once we acknowledged the problems, we needed to figure out how to do our part to become part of the solution. That required us changing our behaviors and our expectations. We started by adding our own weekly visits to the farmers market where we could find locally grown food, and put our money directly into the hands of the growers. We continue to work to be more seasonally aware, trying to base our meal planning more on what is in season in our local area. Illinois was where that transformation started for us, but the move to Green Acres made really living the goal possible. Now, the vast majority of our produce comes from our own garden, and our local farmers markets. And I am finally putting some of my childhood training to work, storing, preserving and freezing what is in season for our own use later. Access to locally grown meat is becoming easier as more people embrace the local food movement, so now a large portion of our meat is also locally sourced (Sweetland Farms, Two Dogs Farm, Wild Dandelion Acres, Whitney Farm). And much of the dairy we use (what is not provided by our own goat) comes from a local dairy (Calder Dairy), with the added benefit that it is delivered right to our door. My organic whole wheat flours, and oats for baking and my pecans come from family farmers we connected with while we were in Illinois,(Brian Severson Farm, Dwight, IL and Voss Pecan, Carlyle, IL), purchased directly from the farm family producers, but now that we have moved to Michigan, delivered to our home via USPS.

Are we perfect? Far, far from it. For some things our excuse is that we love them, and they don’t grow here: coffee, chocolate, rice, almonds, cashews, avocados, citrus, pineapple, grapes, bananas, peanut butter, olives, salmon, etc. For others, we just want them at the wrong times (like fresh strawberries in September), and nothing else feels like an adequate substitute at that moment. For other things, we just haven’t yet made the time to explore and find the right local source, even though it is out there! Fortunately, we have a great resource for continuing to grow our own local food network, the Local Food Guide and online local farm and food search tool provided by Taste the Local Difference, a Michigan business raising awareness of local food options.

I have always enjoyed cooking for family and friends, but there is something especially satisfying about putting a dish on the table that is made entirely of food we have locally sourced or even better, grown ourselves. Not to mention that it tastes better. Locally grown produce can be picked when it is just ready to eat, using varieties selected for taste, rather than their ability to survive a trip around the world, followed by sitting for days in the produce section of your supermarket.
Below, I am posted a simple recipe I tried out a few days ago, herb and garlic goat cheese stuffed peppers. They were pretty amazing, if I may say so myself, and every ingredient (except the olive oil and salt) came from right here at Green Acres Farm! Please note, I wasn’t “measuring” anything, so all the amounts are estimates. However, these were so good, just get it in the ball park and I don’t think you can go wrong!

Herb and Garlic Goat Cheese Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients:

• Approximately 6 small sweet peppers, such as mini bell peppers, or candy cane peppers, or around 3 sweet banana pepper, cut in half, seeds and membranes removed.
• 4-6 oz of soft goat cheese (eyeball what you will need to put cheese in all your peppers)
• 1 large clove garlic, finely grated
• 1-2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh herbs of your choice (I used thyme, rosemary and parsley).
• Salt to taste
• Olive oil

Directions:

1. Rub the peppers inside and out with a small amount of olive oil
2. Blend the garlic and herbs into the soft goat cheese, and add salt to taste.
3. Fill the peppers with the herbed cheese mix.
4. Place peppers on a cookie sheet or baking pan, large enough to leave a little open space around each pepper.
5. Put the oven rack 6 inches below your broiler heat source, and broil the peppers on high until the cheese and peppers are nicely browned. I can’t tell you exactly how long (5-10 minutes?), but check every few minutes until you see them just start to brown and bubble, and then at least once a minute until they are toasted and bubbly all over.
6. Let them cool for a few minutes and the enjoy!